Throughput maximization is a key challenge for wireless applications in Cognitive Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (CVANETs). As a potential solution, cooperative communications, which may increase link capacity by exploiting spatial diversity, has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, if link scheduling is considered, this transmission mode may perform worse than direct transmission in terms of end-to-end throughput. In this paper, the authors propose a cooperative communication aware link scheduling scheme and investigate the throughput maximization problem in C-VANETs. Regarding the features of cooperative communications and the availability of licensed spectrum, they extend the links into cooperative links/general links, define extended link-band pairs, and form a 3-Dimensional (3- D) cooperative conflict graph to characterize the conflict relationship among those pairs.